Several commenters had concerns about my post on not believing in God. This is understandable, since there I take a concept that a large chunk of the world’s population has oriented their lives around for over a thousand years, dismiss it in a couple short paragraphs and spend more than half the post instead discussing why I avoid calling myself an atheist.

That is to say that the topic of disbelief in God deserves more attention than I gave it there. And as most commenters pointed out, it does depend heavily on how you define God. The idea of God that I have the strongest objection to is an omnipotent omnibenevolent being, one who is all-powerful and perfectly good. Such a being seems to me manifestly absurd given all the terrible suffering of the world, which no such being has put a stop to. Given what we observe every day (let alone what we see on the news), any existent omnibenevolent being would have to be weak and struggling to achieve good in a universe far more powerful than it, and any existent omnipotent being would have to be an unfeeling brutish monster. In this respect, the connection that ibn Sīnā makes between God and the world makes it much harder for me to believe in a God. For ibn Sīnā, God is not just one more entity to add to the world; the existence of God changes how we understand the world itself. If there is a God, the world must be built according to divine plan. I have tended to accept ibn Sīnā’s conditional statement. But where ibn Sīnā responds to that conditional with a modus ponens – there is a God, therefore the world exists according to divine plan – I respond with a modus tollens, that the world does not exist according to divine plan, and therefore there cannot be a God.

Commenters, however, spoke of conceptions of God quite different from ibn Sīnā’s, ones that did not involve an omnipotent omnibenevolent being. Ted noted, correctly, that gods appear in the stories of the Buddha; Elisa Freschi spoke of “the god attained through worship and one was connected to Him through a loving relationship.” Neither of these needs to be omnipotent; they may not even be omnibenevolent.

Such an entity is Mañjuśrī, the celestial bodhisattva to whom I pray every night. I take him to be omnibenevolent, personifying compassion for suffering beings like me and others, but not omnipotent. His existence is not a contradiction of reality in the way that I take the Abrahamic god to be. And yet, despite those nightly prayers, I still do not believe he exists.

Why not? Because, as far as I can tell, such a belief would be unscientific. I am aware of no evidence suggesting such beings exist, or have any efficacy in the world beyond human beings’ belief in them or actions with respect to them. That latter form of efficacy is major; it is why “religion” matters a great deal even for atheists. But it does not imply the beings’ existence. Stalin’s belief in Lysenko’s biology had major (negative) effects on the world; those effects do not make Lysenko’s ideas any less false. My own prayers to Mañjuśrī do have effects on me, too, but that does not mean either that Mañjuśrī is real or that I believe he is.

There is a technical sense in which I believe Mañjuśrī exists. I believe Mañjuśrī exists in the sense I believe Superman exists – in our minds as a work of fiction (and one which, like Superman, holds out a model of virtue). Predicates of truth and falsity do apply to fictional entities: “Superman was born on Krypton” is true in a way that “Superman was born on Uranus” is not. This distinction is crucial to Anselm’s argument – even for one like me who disbelieves in God, a concept of God still exists in the mind. The conclusions Anselm draws from this regarding his existence do not follow, though, and even if they did, they are not supposed to work for a being like Mañjuśrī who is not perfect (because, even if omnibenevolent, he is not omnipotent).

I think an omnipotent, omnibenevolent God (like ibn Sīnā’s and Anselm’s) is impossible in principle – the obvious suffering of the world makes a mockery of any such being. A lesser god, such as Mañjuśrī or such as Elisa describes, is not impossible. Such a being could exist. I just think we have no reason to believe that it does – and sufficient reason to believe that it doesn’t. Nobody has found a replicable way to demonstrate such a god’s effects on the world beyond simple belief. That natural historians have combed over most corners of the world and never found a unicorn is, I think, sufficient reason not to believe in the existence of unicorns. I don’t think there is greater reason than that to believe in the existence of gods.

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16 thoughts on “Are there non-omnipotent gods?”

I agree with the fact that the problem of evil (to use a short label) needs to be taken seriously and cannot be just explained away with a trick such as one’s previous karman (if God *can* save one notwithstanding karman and does not, S/He is cruel, if S/He cannot, S/He is not omnipotent). Knowing my limitations, *I* see only two ways out, namely:
—God is benevolent but not omnipotent. Why not? For instance, because of their limitations, but perhaps also because they want to leave place for you to be free. Why? Perhaps because they want to be loved and love is worthless if it is gained out of captivity.
—God is not a substance separate from the world S/He controls. Rather, S/He should be conceived as the manifold world itself. Going beyond duality might enable one a different persepective on the problem of evil (because, after all, God would be themselves suffering along).

Sure, there is no problem of suffering if the god in question is either not omnipotent or not omnibenevolent! (The “not a separate substance” suggests to me not omnibenevolent -like Krishna, for example.) That’s the kind of god I’m thinking of in this piece – which I still don’t think actually exists.

For some reason, this line of argument concerning the presence of suffering or evil in the world has not really resonated with me for some time.

First of all, what would the ‘good’ world look like, that an omnipotent & benevolent god would produce? Would it be absolutely without any frustrations or inconvenience, so that the sun was always shining, you never stubbed your toe, and your every desire was immediately fulfilled? That state of affairs could easily be hell, through boredom and meaninglessness (and the deleterious effects of these on human character might make such a state of affairs temporary anyway). But any state of affairs that does not have those (& other) defects because it lets anything bad happen is vulnerable to the charge of insufficient benevolence on the part of its creator.

To be alive, even in the case of a plant, involves proceeding against some kind of resistance. How much more is this so in the case of a human life fully lived: if everything were just given to you, if there were no chance of anything bad happening, you could hardly claim to be living a life. Everything meaningful seems to involve picking up a load and carrying it, in some sense. We are creatures of the sort that can only really actualise ourselves in the face of something we wouldn’t like. This being so, an omnipotent god would show its benevolence by allowing for the possibility of suffering. From this point, arguments about degree are possible, but don’t seem to me that interesting.

This reflection seems to me to put me in the ballpark of Augustine’s answer to the problem of evil: it’s a result of free will. More fully, it’s a consequence of the sort of creatures we are, striving to be fully alive and free. Why would a benevolent god create such creatures? Love – i.e., that they might freely love, freely taking part in the other-centered movement characteristic of the divine itself.

I don’t have any patience for the free-will argument, for reasons I talked about here a while ago. Free will does not explain earthquakes and diseases. It’s a complete red herring.

Regarding the bigger and more important points you make about what kind of world an omnipotent and omnibenevolent being would actually create: yes, it would surely contain some suffering. But not the kind of suffering this world contains, which goes a lot further than “frustrations and inconveniences”. I could believe a good god had created the world *I* have lived in, where there are pains and heartbreaks but I learn from them and they work out in the end. But not a world where small children drown in floods or die painfully of smallpox. I’ve never seen any remotely plausible justification for that.

I agree with you to some degree concerning free will – there are two sides to the problem here, and that the problem of suffering caused by nature, rather than by people, is the harder one to deal with. I was trying to ground an answer to the former in the latter.

But (to introduce another line of thought) what does all this come down to in the end? On the basis of what do we pronounce? Your statement “I could believe…” could be irrefutable, for it’s a matter on which you’re an unanswerable authority. But however exactly it’s meant, it puts the stress on your belief, on how things seem to you. I don’t know if it’s the right way to proceed here – it seems rather Protagorean: man is the measure of, in this case, God. That is, for you the basic point seems to rely on a notion of a tolerable threshold of suffering beyond which a benevolent omnipotent god is no longer possible – and it seems to rely on it pretty directly (you speak of what’s ‘obvious’ or ‘manifestly absurd’) without further considerations. It’s a matter of fairly immediate experience, it seems to me. But different people will put that threshold in very different places – you and I would find things intolerable that are a matter of course for many in the third world, and the new toxic cult of fragility and victimhood being inculcated at our universities considers things intolerable that don’t bother us (and people have suffered in the most extreme manner while believing in a benevolent omnipotence). This sort of difference always crops up with immediate experience. So the question I’m aiming at is this: given the plurality of opinion, why would the threshold that seems obvious to you give us a grasp of reality?

Those who do believe in an omnipotent benevolent deity believe God to be the measure of God, and that what seems obvious to us may in fact be wrong.

So, you’re raising some very important questions here about the relationship of ontology to epistemology, truth to justification. There’s a lot to be said about them and at some point I probably will. (There’s a little about it here and here, but not enough to answer your point properly.)

However, I don’t think that’s necessary in the context of the present discussion. The “I could believe” phrasing could be replaced by “It could be the case that”, and I would stand by it. It is not the case that an omnipotent and omnibenevolent god would have created a world in which many small children die in floods and plagues before they have any chance at life. That’s the point at issue.

Yeah, the epistemic issues here are pretty big. But I don’t think saying ‘it could be the case’ doesn’t necessarily get you out of the Protagorean woods, for the question follows, ‘why?’ If the answer doesn’t go beyond ‘it just seems like that to me,’ we’re still left with man as the measure.

More and more, I think any time immediacy is used as a logical ground for anything in philosophy, something has gone wrong.

Regarding the statement “It is not the case that an omnipotent and omnibenevolent god would have created a world in which many small children die in floods and plagues before they have any chance at life”: Do you actually think I don’t have an answer to the question “Why?” beyond “it just seems like that to me”? Is the answer to why an omnipotent omnibenevolent god would not do that really that mysterious to you?

From what you’ve written, it seemed you were taking it as an obvious point, with an opposite that is ‘manifestly absurd.’ What’s taken as obvious, when it is in fact not obvious (many disagree), does seem to me to point to a Protagorean sort of situation.
Me, I can think of scenarios in which an OO god would do that (e.g., those babies get into heaven, or their souls get re-embodied again).

Pretty much every argument requires assuming *something* – typically multiple things – as obvious. If the interlocutor questions it, it can then be debated, but if every obvious point has to be questioned in every debate you’re never going to get anywhere with anything. (That’s pretty much what Descartes tried to do, and he wound up assuming things he shouldn’t have himself.)

Yes, *if* there’s an afterlife then the idea of an omnipotent omnibenevolent god permitting this world’s suffering is not obviously absurd. But the whole idea of this post was to explain why I don’t believe in unscientific phenomena, which I take an afterlife to be. That could be disputed, but I’m not sure that it needs to be here. I don’t think *you* believe in an afterlife, and if you don’t, it doesn’t change things much to bring it up.

What is omniscience but to see the world from a perspective that is not limited — or to see the world from all perspectives at once? Then, is it fair to criticize omniscience as “monstrous” because the view or actions of an omniscience god do not conform with desires arising from man’s limited perspective?

Apparently with no surprise,
To any happy flower,
The Frost beheads it at its play,
In accidental power.
The blond assassin passes on,
The sun proceeds unmoved,
To measure off another day,
For an approving god.

Is the destruction of leaves in the forest in the autumn monstrous? Is it a criticism of god that the world has suffering? Or is the criticism better directed at man’s confusion, his inability to see that the world does not revolve around protecting his mistaken, limited view? Moreover, from the omniscient point of view, isn’t suffering a break in the wall of confusion that lets in the light? Isn’t suffering, potentially (if it is examined with clear eyes), the beginning of a path toward a less limited perspective — toward omniscience?

Well, first of all, there’s a difference between omniscience and omnipotence. I don’t think Buddhists are vulnerable to the problem of suffering because, while buddhas are taken to be omniscient, as far as I know they are never taken to be omnipotent. They are aware of all the suffering out there, they recognize it’s bad, and the reason they don’t just stop all of it right away is that, however great their powers are, they are not that great.

On a slightly different angle, I think it is possible to argue that suffering is not actually bad from a standpoint of ultimate truth. Which sounds like the point you’re taking here, and it aligns with the Sellarsian take on conventional and ultimate truth that I’m increasingly sympathetic too. But it seems to me that from such an ultimate standpoint, a god would not be good, either: values of good and bad arise at the conventional level of human existence.

That is interesting, yeah. Not a direction I’m going in myself, but I appreciate the idea.

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